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This document uses a bunch of jargon that I couldn't find good explanations/definitions for. Is there a good GC survey out there? If I wanted to write a modern GC and knew nothing about it, where would I look to get started? What should I read to get up to speed?


Wilson's "Uniprocessor Garbage Collection Techniques" (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.47.2...) is what you want: an excellent survey paper of fundamental garbage collector designs.

I highly recommend the Jones/Hosking/Moss book, but it assumes familiarity with the basics. Pick it up if the Wilson paper intrigues you. The previous edition of the book (Jones & Lins) is good, too, but the new one adds a lot of important material on real-time GC, concurrent GC, and interactions between GC and runtime systems.


"Garbage Collection: Algorithms for Automatic Dynamic Memory Management" by Richard Jones and Rafael D Lins.

Very readable and approachable. I read the entire book, which I almost never do with technical books.


There's a newer book (2011), "The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management" by Richard Jones, Antony Hoskins and Eliot Moss. I haven't read the new one, but it seems to cover a lot of the recent activity around Java GC.


The recent followup "The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management" is much more up-to-date, but it has a bit less coverage of the more elementary techniques.


Thanks. I'll add it to the queue :-)




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